Category Archives: Lehigh Faculty in the Summer

Saladin Ambar is the Department Chair and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lehigh University. His research recently took him to Germany to track the work of William James and W.E.B. Du Bois

On May 22nd I arrived in Berlin, Germany to begin research funded by a Lehigh Faculty Innovation Grant. I was there to investigate the influence of German education on the thinking and political thought of both Harvard University’s William James, and his then student, W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to graduate from that institution with a PhD. In addition to seeking out the archives at Humboldt University (formerly the University of Berlin), I was also asked to present my research to a group of graduate students at the University of Potsdam. At the invitation of Professor Logi Gunnarsson, an expert on James’s work, I was able to share the influence of James’s teaching on the young Du Bois, as we navigated James’s 1890 text “The Hidden Self.” The dialogue and feedback was wonderful. And I made an invaluable friend and colleague in Logi. We often forget how influential German intellectuals were in shaping the American academy. James and Du Bois were no different. It was truly exciting to be in this formerly divided city, thinking about race, the subconscious mind, and double consciousness, all with young men and women eager to complete their own graduate education and share their perspectives on a topic that clearly crosses the Atlantic in terms of importance. I look forward to returning to Cambridge to learn more about James and Du Bois at Harvard – but also one day to Berlin – and to Potsdam – to revisit the same field of study that so shaped these two critical thinkers in American race and psychology.

Jenna Lay is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department of Lehigh University.

The academic lifecycle is an unusual one. Years unfold in months-long stretches of time: fall and spring semesters devoted to teaching and running academic programs; summer, as Nicholas Sawicki suggests in his post, offering time for larger projects, writing, and travel—like the archival work Elizabeth Dolan describes. The rhythm of an academic career offers similar ebbs and flows, as the boisterous conversation of graduate coursework transforms into the solitary discipline of a dissertation, which, in turn, enables the intellectual growth that will foster new forms of engagement in the classroom and in a broad range of communities.

As a pre-tenure faculty member at Lehigh, I spent the last six years building on that foundation: transforming the knowledge and skills gained through graduate study into the research, teaching, and service that structure academic days, months, and years. I can now hold the most material of these transformations in my hands: my first book, Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture, was published this month by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

With my book’s publication, I’ve been thinking about the research lifecycle, and especially about how scholars transition from one project to the next. Watching my words evolve from malleable files on my computer to the relative fixity of a printed book, I’ve become increasingly convinced that a research project is never truly complete: that the questions answered will inevitably spark new ideas and areas for exploration. And yet this is still a summer of endings and beginnings, of one project completed and another just developing. In this blog post, I’ll say a bit about what a transitional period like this entails: what did my summers look like when I was working on Beyond the Cloister? How does this summer differ?

David Anastasio is a geologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University. He is currently blogging from his research site in Spain. Catch up here!

A persistent debate surrounds the chronology of the colonization of Europe. The Guadix-Baza Basin in southern Spain is the repository of 2,000 m of ancient sedimentary strata that record the depositional, climatic, ecological, and tectonic events along the European-African plate boundary at a time of hominin migration out of Africa. The basin was also the

lake beds where a 1.4Ma hominid tooth (pictured) was discovered site of the last connection between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea before the modern connection at Gibraltar. Retreat of the seaway resulted in the largest lake in Europe, which evolved from grassland environments to a savannah landscape with abundant game. Previous studies have established the paleoenviromental evolution of the archeological sites but without precise chronologies it is not possible to reconcile arguments as to whether evolving climactic or geographic barriers in the Betic Cordillera were instrumental in facilitating the peopling of Europe or whether hominins simply “followed the herd”.

Josep Parés (Spanish Research Center for Human Evolution) and I are using the record of periodic changes in Earth’s orbital parameters (Milankovitch cycles) that are encoded in nearly all sedimentary rocks to refine chronologies. Orbital cycles are known to result in natural long-term variations in Earth’s climate. When tuned to absolute time control, cyclostratigraphy constitutes a metronome with a precision, accuracy, and continuity that out performs other dating methods. Our sampling strategy will allow the basin’s paleoarcheology sites to be more precisely dated and correlated so that coordinated paleogeographic and paleoenvironmental parameters can be established.

Nicholas Sawicki is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Architecture and Design at Lehigh University. He has been working this summer on an exhibition in the Czech Republic.

For research, the summer months have a different pace to them than the rest of the year. The campus becomes quieter, time frees up, and it becomes possible to work on larger projects that can’t be fit into the usual academic calendar. This is the time of year when I’m either buried in writing or packing my bags for travel, and this summer has been no different. I’ve been spending most of my days putting the final touches on a museum exhibition that I’m curating in the Czech Republic, which I have just finished installing.

The exhibition focuses on the artist Friedrich Feigl (1884-1965). He was a prominent modernist painter and printmaker from Prague, and spent part of his career in Berlin and London. I have been publishing on Feigl for some time, and a few years ago I was approached with the idea of curating an exhibition of his work. The invitation came from the Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb, a Czech state museum in what used to be known as the Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia that Nazi Germany annexed in 1938.

Today Cheb is a city of around 30,000, with a historic town square of late gothic, renaissance, and baroque buildings. The Gallery of Fine Arts is housed in a large palace built in the early 18th century as the city’s town hall. It has an extensive museum collection, and has recently started organizing exhibitions of German and Jewish artists once active in Czechoslovakia, whose memory and legacy was mostly erased by World War II, the Holocaust, and postwar communism. Feigl was Jewish and spent much of his life in the country, until the Nazis advanced on Prague in spring 1939, forcing him and his wife to flee for the west. They lost much of their family to the Holocaust, and escaped for London, where Feigl joined a large community of exiled Central European artists, writers, and cultural figures.

The planning of a museum exhibition is generally a long process, with countless decisions to be made along the way: selecting which works to include and researching their history, arranging loans and transport of works from different museums, creating a plan for how these objects will be installed in the gallery space, and writing the narrative text and captions that audiences will use to navigate the exhibition. The two years I had to work on the project were a short window of time, all the more because I was concurrently editing a new monograph on the artist, to be published with the exhibition. To take me through the final stretches of my work, I had the support of a Faculty Research Grant, which helped me bring the project to conclusion.

I had started planning for the exhibition early on with some quick sketches, initially thinking about what selection of works would best tell the story of Feigl’s life and art, and how this narrative might unfold in the five rooms that make up the gallery space. I also decided on a title for the show, Friedrich Feigl: The Eye Sees the World. It had to work equally well in Czech and German, as these two languages are also in use in the textual materials accompanying the exhibition. The titling takes its cue from what I have come to understand as a discerning feature of Feigl’s art—the way his innovative modernist works always retain a connection to the visible world, an unwavering interest and curiosity for the observable subjects of his own physical and social surroundings.

As the planning process for the exhibition moved forward, I worked closely with the director of the Gallery of Fine Arts, Marcel Fišer, to determine which of the works we could actually borrow from museum and private lenders, scattered across the Czech Republic, England, Germany, and the United States. I then used design software to produce more detailed iterations of the installation plan. The exhibition features more than 70 works, and for a show this large in scale, designing the installation is like putting together a puzzle without fully knowing what the outcome will look like until the very end. There are multiple moving parts, and it’s a process that benefits from feedback. While working on the show, I dropped in to talk with colleagues Mark Wonsidler and Jeffrey Ludwig at the Lehigh University Art Galleries to get their input on the exhibition design, which I then further refined and sent on to Cheb.

David Anastasio is a geologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University. He is currently blogging from his research site in Spain. Catch up here!

The Earth’s surface is a dynamic interface that evolves through the influence of tectonic and climatic drivers. Understanding the feedbacks between solid-Earth deformation, surface processes and landscape evolution requires a process-based approach that integrates detailed field observations and temporal determinations across many spatial scales. Changes in tectonic forcing or processes of surface erosion and deposition can alter the near-surface stress field and influence fault evolution, uplift, subsidence patterns, and

Claudio Berti and James Carrigan orienting rock cores to be used for paleo magnetism to determine the age of the deposit.

topographic relief. East of Granada, Spain, Earth and Environmental Sciences Professor Claudio Berti, EES graduate student James Carrigan and I are testing the various models available for the evolution of the Gibraltar Arc and Alboran Sea against the predictions each makes for the Betic Cordillera with field observations and chronologic data along the main drainages of the mountain belt and marine terraces exposed along the Mediterranean coast.

The mountains resulted from the collision between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates over the last 10 million years. The dating methods allow us to measure rates of surface change to add temporal evolution to our snapshot of the current state of the landscape and allow us to reconstruct the tectonic processes that have led to the present state and to test the sensitivity of topography to record processes within the solid Earth.

David Anastasio is a geologist in the Department of Earth and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University

In the scorching summer heat there are very many reasons to find your way to southern Spain. Most of the people I know would say that the crystal clear water of the ocean, many millennia of alternating cultures, and the exquisite food would be at the top of the list…but I am a geologist…and I’ve come to this gorgeous part of the world to study how mountain start, evolve, and grow. From a small wrinkle at the bottom of the ocean, to the majestic peaks of Sierra Nevada, standing more than three kilometers tall above the Mediterranean coast.

How and why do I do this? Well… this is the story I will post to you over the next several days. It is now time for me to enjoy the fresh seafood after a long day in the field! My colleague, Claudio Berti and my student James Carrigan are waiting for me. Talk to you soon!

Elizabeth Dolan is an Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. This summer she embarked on a research trip to the British Library.

From the outside, archival research doesn’t look like much: one scholar alone, reading old and oddly sized books and manuscripts hour after hour. But these crumbling documents hold stories that come alive in the scholar’s mind and offer insight into the nuances of human experience over time. One arrives at an archive with a research plan, an intention to answer a well-defined question. But, once the scholar is elbow deep in the sources, the archive itself begins to shape the research—offering up in the midst of hours of tedious reading unexpected finds, opportunities for new lines of inquiry. These surprises, the questions they raise, the mystery, the putting together of pieces are the great pleasure of archival work.

Thanks to a Faculty Innovation Grant, I’m on the first of several trips in AY 2016-17 to various archives, this time to the British Library in London. I last conducted research in this venerable institution in 1995, while still in graduate school. At that time, the collection was held at the British Museum. One walked up the grand marble steps, past the large marble lions, and into the darkly paneled library to unearth old texts. The new British Library, situated several blocks away from the British Museum, opened in 1998. It exudes a beauty and light appropriate for this invaluable collection of 150 million items, including manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints, drawings, musical scores, patents, sound recordings, stamps, and, of course, books. As the web siteexplains, “If you see 5 items each day, it would take you over 80,000 years to see the whole of the collection.” And it grows by 3 million items a year. Continue reading Archival Research: Intention, Opportunity, Pleasure→